2. 职称英语
  3. (1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United State

(1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United State

游客2024-11-09  7
问题    (1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United States. It had long since outpaced Philadelphia as the largest city in the country, and even though Boston continued to be venerated as the cultural capital of the nation, its image had become somewhat languid: it had not kept up with the implications of the newly industrialized economy, of a diversified ethnic population, or of the rapidly rising middle class. New York was the place where the "new" America was coming into being, so it is hardly surprising that the modern newspaper had its birth there.
   (2) The penny paper had found its first success in New York. By the mid-1830s Ben Day’s Sun was drawing readers from all walks of life. On the other hand, the Sun was a scanty sheet providing little more than minor diversions: few today would call it a newspaper at all. Day himself was an editor of limited vision, and he did not possess the ability or the imagination to climb the slopes to loftier heights. If real newspapers were to emerge from the public’s demand for more and better coverage, it would have to come from a youthful generation of editors for whom journalism was a totally absorbing profession, an exacting vocational ideal rather than a mere offshoot of job printing.
   (3) By the 1840s two giants burst into the field, editors who would revolutionize journalism, would bring the newspaper into the modern age, and show how it could be influential in the national life. These two giants, neither of whom has been treated kindly by history, were James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley. Bennett founded his New York Herald in 1835, less than two years after the appearance of the Sun. Horace Greeley founded his Tribune in 1841. Bennett and Greeley were the most innovative editors in New York until after the Civil War. Their newspapers were the leading American papers of the day, although for completely different reasons. The two men despised each other, although not in the ways that newspaper editors had despised one another a few years before. Neither was a political hack bonded to a political party. Greeley fancied himself a public intellectual. He had strong political views, and he wanted to run for office himself, but party factotum he could never be: he bristled with ideals and causes of his own devising. Officially he was a Whig (and later a Republican) , but he seldom gave comfort to his chosen party. Bennett, on the other hand, had long since cut his political ties, and although his paper covered local and national politics fully and he went after politicians with hammer and tongs, Bennett was a cynic, a distruster of all settled values. He did not regard himself as an intellectual, although in fact he was better educated than Greeley. He thought himself only a hard-boiled newspaperman. Greeley was interested in ideas and in what was happening to the country. Bennett was only interested in his newspaper. He wanted to find out what the news was, what people wanted to read. And when he found out he gave it to them.
   (4) As different as Bennett and Greeley were from each other they were also curiously alike. Both stood outside the circle of polite society, even when they became prosperous, and in Bennett’s case, wealthy. Both were incurable eccentrics. Neither was a gentleman. Neither conjured up the picture of a successful editor. Greeley was unkempt, always looking like an unmade bed. Even when he was nationally famous in the 1850s he resembled a clerk in a third-rate brokerage house, with slips of paper—marked-up proofs perhaps—hanging out of his pockets or stuck in his hat. He became fat, was always nearsighted, always peering over spectacles. He spoke in a high-pitched whine (哀号). Not a few people suggested that he looked exactly like the illustrations of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick. Greeley provided a humorous description of himself, written under the pretense that it had been the work of his long-time adversary James Fenimore Cooper. The editor was, according to the description, a half-bald, long-legged, slouching individual " so rocking in gait (步态) that he walks down both sides of the street at once. "
   (5) The appearance of Bennett was somewhat different but hardly more reassuring. A shrewd, wiry (瘦而结实的) Scotsman, who seemed to repel intimacy, Bennett looked around at the world with a squinty glare of suspicion. His eyes did not focus right. They seemed to fix themselves on nothing and everything at the same time. He was as solitary as an oyster, the classic loner. He seldom made close friendships and few people trusted him, although nobody who had dealings with him, however brief, doubted his abilities. He, too, could have come out of a book of Dickensian eccentrics, although perhaps Ebenezer Scrooge or Thomas Gradgrind comes to mind rather than the kindly old Mr. Pickwick. Greeley was laughed at but admired: Bennett was seldom laughed at but never admired: on the other hand, he had a hard professional competence and an encyclopedic knowledge of his adopted country, an in-depth learning uncorrupted by vague idealisms. All of this perfectly suited him for the journalism of this confusing age.
   (6) Both Greeley and Bennett had served long, humiliating and disappointing apprenticeships in the newspaper business. They took a long time getting to the top, the only reward for the long years of waiting being that when they had their own newspapers, both knew what they wanted and firmly set about getting it. When Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841 he had the strong support of the Whig party and had already had a short period of modest success as an editor. Bennett, older by sixteen years, found solid commercial success first, but he had no one behind him except himself when he started up the Herald in 1835 in a dingy cellar room at 20 Wall Street. Fortunately this turned out to be quite enough. [br] Which of the following is NOT the author’s opinion on Ben Day and his Sun (Para. 2) ?
选项 A、Sun had once been a popular newspaper.
B、Sun failed to be a high-quality newspaper.
C、Ben Day lacked innovation and imagination.
D、Ben Day had striven for better coverage.
答案 D
解析 细节理解题。根据题干关键词Ben Day和Sun定位至第二段。该段第五句中提到了more and better coverage，但指的是真正好的报纸是源于公众对更多、更好的新闻报道的需求，原文并没有提到戴是否为争取做出更好的新闻报道而努力，故D不符合原文，为答案。从第二段第二句开始至本段第四句，作者简要介绍并评价了最早获得成功的便士报纸《太阳报》，其中第二句指出它吸引了社会各个阶层的读者，可见它很受欢迎，故A的说法符合原文，应排除；第三句中作者指出它只能提供一些小小的消遣，以现今的标准都难以称为真正的报纸，可见B与原文一致，故排除；第四句中作者评价了创办者，指出他见识有限，缺乏想象力，可知C也是正确的，故排除。
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